The Future of Our Faith: An Intergenerational Conversation on Critical Issues Facing the Church
Ronald J. Sider and Ben Lowe (Brazos Press)
Tensions between generations abound in just about every area of life, not least within the church. The Future of Our Faithengineers a dialogue between an elder statesman of evangelicalism (Ronald Sider, age 76) and a younger activist (Ben Lowe, age 31), with each writing four chapters and responding to the other’s. As the pair observes in an introduction, “there’s a lot of talking and writing about each other’s generation, but much less talking and writing with each other. Intentional, charitable, and constructive dialogue is the way to build bridges between our generations and begin moving forward together.” Sider’s essays touch on evangelism, relativism, marriage, and homosexuality, while Lowe weighs in on discipleship, politics, unity, and creation.
And It Was Beautiful: Celebrating Life in the Midst of the Long Good-Bye
Kara Tippetts (David C Cook)
Tippetts—a writer, pastor’s wife, and mother of four—died one year ago from breast cancer at age 38, an ordeal she described in a 2014 memoir, The Hardest Peace. Tippets made headlines when, in the throes of her own suffering, she wrote an open letter to another young sufferer, 29-year-old Brittany Maynard, who had vowed publicly to end her life via assisted suicide rather than endure an aggressive brain tumor. “Suffering,” she wrote, “is not the absence of goodness, it is not the absence of beauty, but perhaps it can be the place where true beauty can be known.” And It Was Beautiful gathers writings from Tippetts’s blog, Mundane Faithfulness, arranging them into three “acts” of a life story.
The Bible Cause: A History of the American Bible Society
John Fea (Oxford University Press)
Since its founding in 1816, the American Bible Society (ABS) has been committed to distributing Bibles throughout the world in a variety of languages. To mark its 200th anniversary, Messiah College historian John Fea has written this history of the organization and its mission across two centuries. Fea (who commented for CT on the ABS’s controversial 2015 relocation from New York City to Philadelphia) draws heavily on anecdotes and remembrances from conversations with key ABS figures. Despite its many changes in size and structure, he illustrates how the organization—which now boasts a $300 million endowment—“has never lost touch with its cultural mandate: to build a Christian civilization in the United States and, eventually, around the world.”
